It is uncanny how smells take me instantaneously back in time and space. I was cutting up a lime the other day for my tonic water and it was almost as if that Moscow Mule guy was standing next to me. All he did was mix up a cocktail and talk about it in the most gorgeous East European/Middle Eastern/Australian accent for half an hour in our office one afternoon and he was gone from my life. And yet, now it seems like the fragrance of lime is him. Fresh, light, bright kind of a memory it evokes. A smiley, tingly memory.
Very few smells represent one single person to me. Mostly they’re encompassing. Like jasmine fragrances are always aunty fragrances, wedding and Udupi smells. Wet earth is always that first day of school smell, little rivulets flowing down the gully beside my building with rainbow patterns on them due to the oil of a leaking car engine, and the water from the school terrace gushing down the pipes and all of us letting it flow over our feet cos it felt so nice and cool. Eucalyptus oil is still that entire holiday at Ooty and Coonoor.
There’s only one other smell I think that evokes memories of one single person. The cologne of a man - the only man I was ever frightened of, whose memories still stunt me emotionally… But that story for another day.
Today, let me enjoy some lime-flavoured effervescent, zippy, zingy whimsy.
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